Guild Wars 2

Same here. It only finished after I opened the upgrade tab even though it should have finished hours ago.

But even worse: There’s now only one upgrade build slot active instead of two. The only way to keep up our guild stuff the way we used to even halfway would be to pretty much rush everything. So I’d like to know what’s the way to deal with this:

1. Wait for fix because it’s being fixed in the next few hours?

2. Use up stored influence and request influene refund through support ticket?

3. Buy influence through gold and request gold refund through support ticket?

4. ….?

As I already said in other threads on the subject, if you need a different amount than the ones currently available, submit a support ticket and let support sort it out for now through a partial refund on your exchange or by converting the exact amount you need.

Just submit a support ticket to have the exact amount you desire exchanged (or part of an exchange refunded) by the support staff. This is currently the only way to deal with this bug.

Submit a support ticket for each exchange to get a partial refund on your exchange process or an additional exchange for a specific amount. For example, I’m now stuck with 903 gems. Since I don’t expect there to be any item soon that costs 1 or 3 gems only, I’ll have to contact support to have those 3 gems converted into gold as well.

Unfortunately this isn’t easy to implement or else it would have been. The reason is that those two items (bank tab and bag expansion) are the only two items you can purchase through the gem store AS WELL AS in-game. The gem store is essentially a web app that runs completely separate from the rest of the game. For all the stuff you can only get through the gem store, a cap is possible because that app has access to the info of how many you already purchased (the collection expander being a prime example). But if you ever bought a bag slot or bank tab in-game, the game server would directly add that slot/tab and deduct the appropriate amount of gems from your account without the gem store app ever knowing about it. So of course it would be possible to add a cap on bank tabs to the gem store, but that would only apply to bank tabs purchased there, and you’d still be able to purchase more than you can actually use if you’ve ever bought a bank tab in-game before.

The regional event dailies have always been there, just waaaay less common, as with almost all previous dailies that can’t be completed in WvW/PvP, as since the 4/15 patch, the focus for dailies always has been: Player should complete them in competitive play, even if they don’t like it. For example the “use the Mystic Forge” daily, which I previously used to make my clovers slowly but surely, has been on about once a week pre-patch, but I have seen it three times at most since the 4/15 patch hit.

FYI: Information gathering on the issue has moved to this thread started by Gaile in the tech forum for greater visibility beyond the PvP sub-forum:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Latency-Lag-for-EU-Players-merged/first

Thank you, Gaile! Couldn’t agree more as to the point of visibility. I don’t do PvP much, if at all, but so far it has been the only place where one of your colleagues has responded on the issue, so this is where feedback has been flowing so far. And with the prominence of a dev response, even quite a few pure PvE players have been drawn there. Once again, thank you for taking care of this and consolidating feedback. <3

FYI: So far, information gathering has been performed by Evan in this thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/MASSIVE-lag-spikes/first

In particular, necessary/helpful information to be reported is described by him in these two posts:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/MASSIVE-lag-spikes/4425831
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/MASSIVE-lag-spikes/4425968

Edit: And now that I’m no longer doing dungeons, I can even quote those two posts here for easier access:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Update on helpful information:
Trying using this command instead of a tracert, and PM me the results:
“pathping -4 -q 100 <ServerIP>”

This is most helpful if you do it DURING the lag spike!

Evan Lesh.3295:

Here are some more questions to answer if you are experiencing lag spikes:

1. Does the lag only happen while you’re in a PvP map? Does it also occur in the PvP lobby? Other maps?
2. How long does the lag spike last? Does it ever clear up?
3. Of your last 5 GW2 play sessions, in how many of them did you experience lag?
4. Are there specific times of day when do or you don’t experience lag?
5. When do you remember first experiencing lag of this severity in GW2?
6. Do you also experience lag playing other games? NCsoft games like Wildstar?
7. Do you live in NA or EU?
8. Are you playing on NA or EU servers?
9. Was your account ORIGINALLY created on NA or EU?

1. Since I don’t play PvP much, it’s only PvE maps for me (open world/dungeons/fracs).
2. Typical duration is 3 – 6 secs, with around 5 sec being the norm.
3. 4 out of 5
4. Can’t say for certain as I mostly notice it when doing dungeons, and that again is mostly when others are online. Seems to be more or less independet of time of day, though.
5. For guildies in the UK (regardless of location or provider), it started about four weeks ago, for me a few days before the last patch, so about two weeks ago.
6. Don’t play other NCsoft games, no issues otherwise, though.
7. – 9. EU

Ok, this much is fact, I pressume: The log-in policy of this forum is a friggin’ royal pain in the posterior. If the forum server doesn’t know you at all (i.e. you’re completely logged out), you can at least read stuff without any limitations. But once you log in, you’re forced to log in every day over and over again if you want to continue reading. I would understand being forced to log in again if I want to make a new post, but just to read stuff?

The real issue here is this: For good reason, I don’t have my game account password stored in the browser password cache. After all, in the not inconceivable case that my machine is compromised, be it by a virus or physically, the browser password cache is one of the obvious and primary targets of opportunity. On the other hand, I have generated a strong and unique password for GW2, so I have to retrieve it from KeePass every day for the purposes of reading these forums. The more often this happens, the more tempted I become to just store it in the browser password cache.

So the question is: Is there any way, any way at all to either make the forum log-in last longer (obvious clue see here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/forum/Session-Cookie-1-year-TTL-Forces-Re-login ), for example by setting a user cookie whose TTL is refreshed each time one visits the forum or to dissociated the game account from the forum account, i.e. having a separate forum password, which, when compromised, wouldn’t also compromise the game account, and thus could be either made easier to memorize or savely stored in the browser password cache?

I’m really curious whether you will get any usable data from traceroutes. I’m not trying to discourage people from doing a traceroute, quite the contrary. I hadn’t bothered with traceroutes so far as the average lag spike is in the vicinity of 5 to 10 secs, which is way shorter than any traceroute can be triggered, let alone completed. Also, unless I’m very much mistaken, the servers themselves do not answer to ICMP packages, so a direct ping at the time of a lag spike isn’t possible either.

I know I have a very good network connection unless I make a dedicated effort to really bottle up my bandwith. For me, the average ping to the last device that will answer to ICMP or UDP packets (which usually is 206.127.157.102) is around 10 ms, which is, I think, as good as it gets. It can get into the 15 ms range at times, but that’s not so common. This is a constant value, i.e. I have these pings to that node not just now but also close to a lag spike event.

So all I’m saying in essence is this: I expect any traceroutes to be much more flavored by the overall network quality of the specific user’s ISP than by whatever is causing those lag spikes for everyone. Therefore treat traceroute data with care.

Also since more and more foes, be they players, NPCs or other critters are made into 0 exp foes, shouldn’t the text for stacking/on kill sigils be updated? For example, bloodlust currently reads:

Gain a charge of +x power each time you kill a foe, five if you kill an enemy player.

Proper text for that sigil would be:

Sometimes gain a charge of +x power each time you kill certain foes in certain environments, five if you kill certain enemy players that haven’t given a charge recently, except for PvP, in which there is no limit on charges gained from enemy players yet.

And since it not only confuses new players, but experienced players even more, how about adding a warning pop-up on entering locations/instances, in which stacking sigils won’t work, such as:

This area/content has enemies that award no “on kill” charges or effect for sigils that otherwise would grant such charges or effects. Play this area/content at your own risk if you have such sigils in use.

It’s not a single provider’s fault. The possible reasons are:

1. Server software, i.e. some code that locks up a thread. But this is unlikely if US has no lag spikes, as I’m pretty certain you’re running the same code in both data centers.
2. Server hardware. Too much load on a single machine or faulty network device or whatever.
3. Synchronization issues. If say a map instance server can’t synch data with the char data server in time, it may cause lag. Since I don’t know anything on how the servers are implemented / how many different server processes there are, and if they allow for asynchronous synchronization or not, this is just a guess.
4. Network hardware in the data center. If a switch or router in the data center acts up on occassion, it may cause the lag spikes we see.
5. Network hardware in a network hub the data center is connected to. More or less same as 4.

The reason I rule out a single ISP or group of ISPs is this: If a lag spike happens, it seldomly happens to only one person in the party. And since I’m playing on an English EU server, people are from all over the place. First I suspected some network hub or backbone issues related to some major UK ISP as those party members from the UK seemed to be affected earlier and more often than us other players. But lately, especially in the past two weeks, it more or less affects us all equally. And that would for example include a party made up of five people from the UK, the Netherlands, Singapore, Germany and Bahrein. There is no possible way it could affect all those at the same time if it weren’t tied to a reason in or pretty close to the data center.

Edit: Oh, and yes, on one occassion (different party though, but still people living on different continents) we got all booted out of our fracs instance and lost it this way. So since the instance was gone, I’d make it an even chance that in this case it wasn’t a lag spike that booted us, but the server process crashing instead. Still, the lag spikes have been very common the past few days and almost always affected several people at once from completely different locations.

Edit 2: I just remembered one instance the other day where we got a skill lag for 5 – 10 seconds (no damage numbers, NPCs not moving etc., i.e. no data flow from the map server process), but the guild and party chat went on unhindered. In the pretty likely case you have the chat server process running on different hardware, but in the same data center, that would narrow it down to reasons 1-3 given above, with some weird scenarios I can think of that would even allow for #4. But if that instance of a lag spike was triggered by the same cause that triggered others, it makes #5 extremely unlikely and would completely rule out any issues with a particular ISP.

Edit 3: Disregard the previous edit. Completely forgot that chat is global and thus you probably have the chat server process(es) running in the US. Haven’t bothered with analyzing the network traffic. However, I deliberately kept an eye on this phenomenon, and it is indeed the case that chat works perfectly while the instance server gives a lag spike, as for example just now in a fracs instance.

The response by GM Talon in this post https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Customer-Support-9-9-Feature-Build/4391299 suggests that the collection actually exists and is just bugged for a whole lot of people.

The real question is: Is there ANYONE out there for whom it is active? If not it might be content removed immediately before release to confuse people.

I was wondering the same thing just now. Only way jewelers can craft their backitems is by buying stuff on tp or doing other crafting discipline first.

Yupp. Other bonuses still work though, such as the guild buffs or food based bonuses, just the account bonus no longer applies.

Since there’s only a couple posts concerning MF specifically, but not the account bonuses in general, let’s make an official report that ALL account bonuses no longer work / are not applied any more since Tuesday’s LW patch. As other people have noticed, the account bonuses are no longer factored in for the displayed MF (and thus also probably the internally used MF), but it’s obvious that karma and exp gain are much lower now that the bonuses no longer apply.

As an aside: When this is fixed, which I hope is soon, will we get a mail with some liquid karma/exp at least like the last few times when karma gain wasn’t working properly? The added up karma loss can be significant after all if you have a bonus of 10 % or more that won’t work any more.

And there I was thinking that we were the only ones who suddenly don’t like playing GW any more. It was such a nice and cozy community. Oh well, time to move on…

So… Anyone has a good idea of what to do with all the time we used to play GW2 in?

Lil Puppy.5216:

You can get it from the karma heart vendor in Dostoev Sky Peak in the middle of Dredgehaunt Cliffs

Thank you! This one finally worked. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I had already tried some of the Karma vendor masks without success, but not this one.

I’m afraid that neither crafting, wearing nor salvaging the Bloodsaw Leather Mask unlocked the skin. Any other ideas?

Does anyone know of an item that will unlock the Rogue Mask in the Wardrobe? The two items I tried so far didn’t do the trick:

• Supple Leather Mask Skin from the WvW Armorsmith
• Oldgate Leather Mask from the Karma Vendor

The first one just shows “Skin Locked” without naming the skin, though, the second item doesn’t show any skin info at all. Is there an item that will unlock this skin?

I suppose this post just as well would fit into the “Bug Reports” forum, but I’m more interested to know if there’s another item with that skin than to report a bug that probably has been reported a dozen times already…

One final remark goes not to the amount of dailes but to one daily in particular. Regardless of what happens to the amount of dailies, pretty please with sugar on top and candy sprinkles change World Ranker so that it requires only one rank to complete. On the high population servers, it might not make that much of a difference either way, but I’m on a low population server, which now was robbed of half its decent WvW players through free pre-tournament transfers to silver league servers.

The gist of it is that outside of early evening prime time, WvW is pretty much dead half the time. That leaves three options:

1. Soloing stuff (sentry posts, caravans and the odd camp), which gives so little WXP that it takes forever and a day to gain a level, let alone the fact that you can’t recap the same sentry post or camp until an enemy server has taken it back. Basically you need to take 50 sentry posts, 10 camps (rating the camp at 300 WXP including 5 × 20 WXP from guard/scout kills) and 40 caravans to complete that daily. If you’re fast, you can take a sentry post in roughly two minutes (including the time of walking there, killing the guard and then taking the post), a camp in say four minutes and a caravan in one minute. That’s roughly 3.5 hours to complete that one daily.
2. Waiting for people to come join in WvW so you can start taking on more serious stuff like towers and keeps. Sometimes you get lucky there, but more often than not it either takes forever and a day to get even a party of three to five people going or we already own most of the stuff and there’s not much more left to take, and WvW being equally dormant on our peer servers it can take very long until something changes hands again. Gaining two ranks this way can take anything from 30 min. (SM + some keeps) to four or five hours.
3. Zerging EotM. Currently this is what I’m doing to get that achie as it’s the only halfway reliably way to get the necessary WXP. Gaining two ranks from roaming EotM takes around 45 minutes, but that’s based on a very limited set of experiences, and always doing just that is boring in any case.

Before WXP was account bound, there was always the option of bringing several chars close to a WvW rank gain over the course of several days and then playing other chars until that daily came up. When the daily was up, taking some sentry posts and camps would complete it. But now, the only way is to actually complete whatever remains from the rank you’re starting out with plus one full rank.

As I said above, on busy servers, gaining WXP and WvW ranks might be easy, but on low population servers and for people who are not focused or even solely committed to WvW, gaining one WvW rank can take way longer than gaining one regular level (for which usually some events, some renown hearts, some dailies or a dungeon run are enough), and the comparable daily “Leveler” only requires one level to be gained to complete. I’d much rather do two regular levels than one, let alone two WvW levels/ranks.

However, I don’t wanna end the previous post without making a suggestion that should cater to everyone’s desires. These I define as on the one hand us GW2 nerds wanting more dailies back in the achie rotation and on the other hand ANet/the game designers wanting to limit the amount of achie points while at the same encouraging (forcing) people to do stuff they don’t really like. I suppose what I’m suggesting won’t accomplish that last aspect as it will give people a lot more freedom in what to do than the designers might want to, but hope springs eternal, and there’s still hope that our having fun eventually will rank higher than forcing people into game modes they don’t like that much.

So, here goes:

1. Keep the full set of roughly 60 different dailies in rotation (that would include all the previously available PvP dailies, as I suppose that the two/three/five tournament wins have been removed from the rotation as it is now; there’s no way to tell yet which of the PvE/WvW dailies might have been removed from the rotation as well).
2. Of these, have a more or less random subset of 16 – 20 dailies be active on any given day.
3. Limit the amount of achie points one can get from completing dailies to say 10 per day, thus still rewarding those who do more than the minimum of 5, but at the same time preventing an inflation of achie points from dailies alone.
4. Finally, for those crazy achie hunters out there (yeah, I count myself among them), add a new general achievement of “Lifetime Dailies completed”. Have that give another 5 achie points or so with every tier, the tiers being e.g. 100/250/500/750/1.000/1.250/… This way, there’s still a noticeable, yet rather modes reward for those who – for one reason or another – complete most, if not all dailies.

Just to clarify any possible misunderstandings, let me give an example:

• Casual gamers and those who only ever want to do the minimum to get the daily rewards will get 5 – 6 achie points per day for a maximum total of about 150 per month and (after having reached the first two tiers of 100 and 250) about half a tier in the Lifetime Dailies achie, accounting for a nother 2 -3 achie points per month on average.
• More active gamers will complete around 10 dailies a day for a monthly total of 250 – 300 achie points and complete about one tier in the Lifetime Dailies achie, which yields them another 5 achie points per month.
• Crazy GW2 nerds and all others who go for the full package will complete 15 – 20 dailies each day. That’s still a monthly total of 300 achie points due to the cap of 10 points per day, but they progress about two tiers in the Lifetime Dailes achie per month, which brings their monthly point total to 310 – 315.

If game designers feel that the “bonus reward” can be a bit higher than 10 points a month, just increase the tier reward for Lifetime Dailies from say 5 to 10 points.

People abhore change, yet adapt to it sooner or later. It will be the same here. The best thing about this is it will free up a lot of time for me, as I’ll be playing less GW2 now. I always loved doing pretty much all the dailies for four reasons:

• First and foremost, I’m a collector. Filling up or completing stuff gives me pleasure. Therefore I’m an achie kitten. I just love completing achievements, and yeah, reaching the achie milestones counts as an achievement as well, even though it’s only a psychological one. Less dailies to do= less sense of accomplishment = possibly more frustration with other aspects of the game one doesn’t like as much.

• I love doing as many different things in a game like this as possible to keep things fresh and interesting. There’s a lot in the game I’m not exactly keen on and would never actively go do without some sort of external motivation, yet still enjoy having done afterwards. Examples would be jumping puzzles (I’m just plain bad at ‘em, but if there’s a daily, why not?), personal story (having completed it on one char, doing it on another won’t give you that much new stuff to discover, but eventually one wants to complete it on other chars as well, so why not when there’s a daily) or re-doing story dungeons (unlocking exp modes on additional chars, one daily at a time). Having a lot of different dailies to complete always served me as a sort of guide of what I could do next if I had a lot of time on my hands but nothing in particular came to mind. As it is now, most of the dailies are more or less completed in half an hour or so, and there’s little left to do over the rest of the day after that.

• It just plain gives one something to do without getting bored out of your mind. Maybe this is just putting the previous point a different way, but in a 2 month+ Living World hiatus as we have now, dailies are pretty much the only thing left to do achie-wise, and very likely this won’t be the last prolonged dearth in new stuff and achies one can do in GW2’s lifetime. So I’m already dreading the next such extended period because likely I will have to look for interesting stuff to do in other games and activities. As experience tells, once you discover something else that’s more interesting, the chances of comming back to what once was interesting (GW2) get increasingly remote as time passes.

• I loved the dailies for levelling up my new chars. I don’t like using stuff like “Tomes of Knowledge”, as it somehow feels like cheating to me to just gain a level with one click. Since in this game, killing stuff gives very little exp compared to other options, I do as many dailies as possible with my underleveled chars for the exp bonus that comes with completing a daily. Not only does this give me a wide variety of stuff to do to gain exp even with a freshly made char, but it also saves me from doing the same two or three event chains over and over again or doing Queensdale map completion for the umpteenth time.

Having said all that, this is but the second blow in a short while. When I read that there’s now a cap on the number of total achie points one can get from dailies and monthlies, I knew that my time with GW2 will be limited. Of course I’m still a long ways off from reaching the stated cap, but I’m already pretty certain that the day I reach it probably will be one of the last days I’m playing GW2, as there’s not much more for me to do after that for the first reason given above.